Brainful day (day 154)

There are so many worlds.  The world of kombucha.  The world of Pu-erh.  The world of wine.  You can immerse yourself in all those worlds and the nuances can be extremely enticing and confusing all at the same time.  Opinions, jostles, all out flame-wars, friendships, eloquence, it's all there.  I love to be seduced by all that.  I love to feel the consensus of a group and see if I can experience what they mean even in my novice state.

After some research I now know that I have a young Pu-Erh and that I can expect a more mellow but also more pungent taste experience with the aged Pu-Erh.  The consensus seems to be that 10 years is the minimum to be considered 'aged'.  Vintage would be 30+ years.  I am now intrigued enough to go back to the tea shop and buy a 10+ year old Pu-Erh (after I've tasted it).  Tonight I experimented with the young Pu-Erh with a few steeps, and steep times.  I'm not a big fan of the taste but only because it doesn't seem much different than green tea.  And I've had better green teas.

There is some good news on the kombucha front.  All the delays have permitted me to keep testing the pH of the current brew even though I had given up on it.  Tonight I tested it and it is definitely edging away from 4.0.  It would be a 3.7 probably.  The taste is also different, less yeasty.  Who knows, it may be salvaged yet.

Today at Emily Carr was a symposium called "Edge of Chaos" organized by Landon Mackenzie, a most enjoyable energetic talented artist/professor at Emily Carr.  The topic was the brain, neuroscience to be exact.  All the speakers were asked to speak about the relationship between art/culture and the brain.  I attended the afternoon talks and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Peter Reiner, professor at UBC and part of a national neuroethics group, proposed a thought experiment whereby he would switch nervous system with Landon, asking the question of what would happen to identity in that case.  I didn't think he went far enough with his experiment.  By chance I caught up with him in the cafeteria line-up and asked him to speculate on how long it would take for the Landon in him to become unrecognizable.  The conversation was interesting and my curiosity was piqued when we hit upon the comparison of organ rejection, but in this case not by the physical body but by the social body.   His body with Landon's nervous system would quickly be rejected by his wife, his friends, and his peers.  That in itself would provoke massive changes in the brain.  We also hit upon the clumsiness that would result from using his body with her learned behaviours.
Michael Krausz, a profession of psychiatry at UBC, spoke about art-making by individuals that are mentally compromised through trauma, addiction, or illness.  I thought his talk was interesting from the point of view of language and how sometime verbal language can be too restrictive to express felt experience.   The vocabulary of a language influences what can be said and how easily it can be said.  Art-making is more fluid and a language can be invented or manipulated on the spot.  It's definitely more error-prone in terms of dialogue but can also be a rich way into a dialogue that involves other communication methods.  It occurred to me that this may be something to weave into the Smart Graphics talk in June.

A song for this post.

Padding the bottom line (day 152)

bacterial update:  not too much to report.  I finally have Pu-erh tea in my hands.  I tried to purchase some from the Granville Island Tea Company but they were out and counseled me to get it from Chinatown regardless.  Apparently it's a specialty product that you don't want to just approach haphazardly.  Steve went to fetch some for me in Chinatown this afternoon.  The problem with Chinatown is that it's hard to know whether you're getting what you came for because of language and culture barriers.   It's always an adventure and I bet if you did it every week you could build up the right relationships.   What we acquired is a 4 year old raw pu-erh which I'm guessing is like buying a $20 bottle of wine.   It came beautifully packaged as if it was going to be a gift which I suppose is the reason most people like us go into the shop.  I did feel special holding the box and unwrapping the 'melon'.  I brewed a cup and it tastes fine though I was expecting a stronger taste and a darker brew.  It was pretty tough to flake off the tea leaves so perhaps I didn't use enough.   It tastes like an earthy green tea.  It's an odd feeling to not know whether you're drinking the real thing or not.  Like entering a foreign land and hoping you're not mistaking their version of McDonald's for fine dining.  I have a new goal to get myself to a tea shop that will serve genuine samples of Pu-erh tea.  For now I'll use what I have and hope that it'll be drinkable kombucha.  It's been said that a good Pu-erh can create the champagne of kombucha.
The Kefir grains are still dormant while I work my way through all the Kefir.  I give it another two days.

I made a deal with Steve that I would get to bed before midnight today so I'm running out of time to write much more.  But how about that iPad?  It certainly is the talk of the town.  I saw a funny article in the Onion where they portrayed Steve Jobs madly scrambling at the last minute to put together a tablet, finally deciding to just slap a bunch of iPhones together.  I suppose why not keep going with a good thing.   We were all expecting innovation in hardware but we may have received innovation in software and interaction.  I'll have to try it and see.   It's interesting that they didn't use e-ink technology.  They may not have been aiming for the e-book market and in their promotional video they repeat 'web browsing' an awful lot.

A song for this post.